CHAPTER 2 #4
He shuddered abruptly, an abrupt twisting of his back.
Heatflesh poked out on his skin, then receded.
He went to the control switch and pushed the ON button.
The machine began to hum. After perhaps half a minute, a stream of cool, clear water belched from the pipe and went down the drain to be recirculated.
Perhaps three gallons flowed out of the pipe before the pump shut itself down with a final click.
It was a thing as alien to this place and time as true love, and yet as concrete as a Judgment, a silent reminder of the time when the world had not yet moved on.
It probably ran on an atomic slug, as there was no electricity within a thousand miles of here and even dry batteries would have lost their charge long ago.
It had been made by a company called North Central Positronics. The gunslinger didn’t like it.
He went back and sat down beside the boy, who had put one hand under his cheek.
Nice-looking boy. The gunslinger drank some more water and crossed his legs so he was sitting Indian fashion.
The boy, like the squatter on the edge of the desert who kept the bird (Zoltan, the gunslinger remembered abruptly, the bird’s name was Zoltan), had lost his sense of time, but the fact that the man in black was closer seemed beyond doubt.
Not for the first time, the gunslinger wondered if the man in black was letting him catch up for some reason of his own.
Perhaps the gunslinger was playing into his hands.
He tried to imagine what the confrontation might be like, and could not.
He was very hot, but no longer felt sick.
The nursery rhyme occurred to him again, but this time instead of his mother, he thought of Cort—Cort, an ageless engine of a man, his face stitched with the scars of bricks and bullets and blunt instruments.
The scars of war and instruction in the arts of war.
He wondered if Cort had ever had a love to match those monumental scars.
He doubted it. He thought of Susan, and his mother, and of Marten, that incomplete enchanter.
The gunslinger was not a man to dwell on the past; only a shadowy conception of the future and of his own emotional make-up saved him from being a man without imagination, a dangerous dullard.
His present run of thought therefore rather amazed him.
Each name called up others—Cuthbert, Alain, the old man Jonas with his quavery voice; and again Susan, the lovely girl at the window.
Such thoughts always came back to Susan, and the great rolling plain known as the Drop, and fishermen casting their nets in the bays on the edge of the Clean Sea.
The piano player in Tull (also dead, all dead in Tull, and by his hand) had known those places, although he and the gunslinger had only spoken of them that once.
Sheb had been fond of the old songs, had once played them in a saloon called the Traveller’s Rest, and the gunslinger hummed one tunelessly under his breath:
Love o love o careless love
See what careless love has done.
The gunslinger laughed, bemused. I am the last of that green and warm-hued world. And for all his nostalgia, he felt no self-pity. The world had moved on mercilessly, but his legs were still strong, and the man in black was closer. The gunslinger nodded out.
V
When he awoke, it was almost dark and the boy was gone.
The gunslinger got up, hearing his joints pop, and went to the stable door. There was a small flame dancing in darkness on the porch of the inn. He walked toward it, his shadow long and black and trailing in the reddish-ochre light of sunset.
Jake was sitting by a kerosene lamp. “The oil was in a drum,” he said, “but I was scared to burn it in the house. Everything’s so dry—”
“You did just right.” The gunslinger sat down, seeing but not thinking about the dust of years that puffed up around his rump.
He thought it something of a wonder that the porch didn’t simply collapse beneath their combined weight.
The flame from the lamp shadowed the boy’s face with delicate tones.
The gunslinger produced his poke and rolled a cigarette.
“We have to palaver,” he said.
Jake nodded, smiling a little at the word.
“I guess you know I’m on the prod for that man you saw.”
“Are you going to kill him?”
“I don’t know. I have to make him tell me something. I may have to make him take me someplace.”
“Where?”
“To find a tower,” the gunslinger said. He held his cigarette over the chimney of the lamp and drew on it; the smoke drifted away on the rising night breeze. Jake watched it. His face showed neither fear nor curiosity, certainly not enthusiasm.
“So I’m going on tomorrow,” the gunslinger said. “You’ll have to come with me. How much of that meat is left?”
“Only a little.”
“Corn?”
“A little more.”
The gunslinger nodded. “Is there a cellar?”
“Yes.” Jake looked at him. The pupils of his eyes had grown to a huge, fragile size. “You pull up on a ring in the floor, but I didn’t go down. I was afraid the ladder would break and I wouldn’t be able to get up again. And it smells bad. It’s the only thing around here that smells at all.”
“We’ll get up early and see if there’s anything down there worth taking. Then we’ll go.”
“All right.” The boy paused and then said, “I’m glad I didn’t kill you when you were sleeping. I had a pitchfork and I thought about doing it. But I didn’t, and now I won’t have to be afraid to go to sleep.”
“What would you be afraid of?”
The boy looked at him ominously. “Spooks. Of him coming back.”
“The man in black,” the gunslinger said. Not a question.
“Yes. Is he a bad man?”
“I guess that depends on where you’re standing,” the gunslinger said absently. He got up and pitched his cigarette out onto the hardpan. “I’m going to sleep.”
The boy looked at him timidly. “Can I sleep in the stable with you?”
“Of course.”
The gunslinger stood on the steps, looking up, and the boy joined him.
Old Star was up there, and Old Mother. It seemed to the gunslinger that if he closed his eyes he would be able to hear the croaking of the first spring peepers, smell the green, almost-summer smell of the court lawns after their first cutting (and hear, perhaps, the indolent click of wooden balls as the ladies of the East Wing, attired only in their shifts as dusk glimmered toward dark, played at Points), could almost see Cuthbert and Jamie as they came through the break in the hedges, calling for him to ride out with them . . .
It was not like him to think so much of the past.
He turned back and picked up the lamp. “Let’s go to sleep,” he said.
They crossed to the stable together.
VI
The next morning he explored the cellar.
Jake was right; it smelled bad. It had a wet, swampy stench that made the gunslinger feel nauseous and a little lightheaded after the antiseptic odorlessness of the desert and the stable.
The cellar smelled of cabbages and turnips and potatoes with long, sightless eyes gone to everlasting rot.
The ladder, however, seemed quite sturdy, and he climbed down.
The floor was earthen, and his head almost touched the overhead beams. Down here spiders still lived, disturbingly big ones with mottled gray bodies. Many were muties, the true thread long-lost. Some had eyes on stalks, some had what might have been as many as sixteen legs.
The gunslinger peered around and waited for his nighteyes.
“You all right?” Jake called down nervously.
“Yes.” He focused on the corner. “There are cans. Wait.”
He went carefully to the corner, ducking his head. There was an old box with one side folded down. The cans were vegetables—green beans, yellow beans—and three cans of corned beef.
He scooped up an armload and went back to the ladder. He climbed halfway up and handed them to Jake, who knelt to receive them. He went back for more.
It was on the third trip that he heard the groaning in the foundations.
He turned, looked, and felt a kind of dreamy terror wash over him, a feeling both languid and repellent.
The foundation was composed of huge sandstone blocks that had probably been evenly cornered when the way station was new, but which were now at every zigzag, drunken angle.
It made the wall look as if it were inscribed with strange, meandering hieroglyphics.
And from the joining of two of these abstruse cracks, a thin spill of sand was running, as if something on the other side was digging itself through with slobbering, agonized intensity.
The groaning rose and fell, becoming louder, until the whole cellar was full of the sound, an abstract noise of ripping pain and dreadful effort.
“Come up!” Jake screamed. “Oh Jesus, mister, come up!”
“Go away,” the gunslinger said calmly. “Wait outside. If I don’t come up by the time you count to two . . . no, three hundred, get the hell out.”
“Come up!” Jake screamed again.
The gunslinger didn’t answer. He pulled leather with his right hand.
There was a hole as big as a coin in the wall now. He could hear, through the curtain of his own terror, Jake’s pattering feet as the boy ran. Then the spill of sand stopped. The groaning ceased, but there was a sound of steady, labored breathing.
“Who are you?” the gunslinger asked.
No answer.
And in the High Speech, his voice filling with the old thunder of command, Roland demanded: “Who are you, Demon? Speak, if you would speak. My time is short; my patience shorter.”